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"It's almost certain that we will not be able to implement [the reform] on January 1, 2014," said the British junior farming minister Jim Paice.

Speaking on the sidelines of informal talks with European Union counterparts in Denmark, Paice said it was clear that the bloc's Common Agricultural Policy reform "will not be finally agreed until after we have a budget, in other words well into next year."

New York, NY - For the survival of the euro zone and global capitalism in general, Greece's elections on June 17 will be even more important than the landmark vote on May 6.

The May 6 electoral result demonstrated that the majority of the Greek people are refusing to accept the imposed dismantling of their social and economic infrastructure, the flash impoverishment across broad strata of society, the annihilation of the next generation's future, and the vilification of an entire way of life. Even more important, Greek society showed that it will not accept being used as an experiment of global neoliberal economics. As argued in recent article in The Wall Street Journal, this was not merely an economic experiment. German Chancellor Angela Merkel is quoted admitting that, in imposing such painful austerity measures, the troika singled out Greece for punishment as a lesson to any other European societies who might consider resisting its commands.

Nothing surprises us here, least of all the cynicism of both global financial power and the mainstream media in its service. It is, in many ways, an old story. This is not the first time in history where the fate of whole societies was held in the hands of bankers, although it may be dutiful for us to remember that when this is pushed to the extreme, societies unravel in extraordinary violence and international war. Given that the European Union as a political ideal was constituted in order to prevent such unravelling, it is remarkable that its political and economic leadership is most responsible for pursuing this catastrophic course against all sense of prudence and measure.

There are both general and particular dimensions to this situation that must be reiterated.

A year-long fight over renovation rates for public buildings in Europe has resulted in "a brilliant architecture" for revamping the existing stock, the European Parliament's chief negotiator has announced. But only central government "owned and occupied" buildings will be concerned, leaving whole sections unaddressed.

The draft Energy Efficiency Directive, which introduces a 3% renovation rate for all central government "owned and occupied" buildings in Europe, has entered the final straight.

Next Wednesday (13 June), negotiators from the European Commission, the European Parliament and the EU member states will try to hammer down a compromise on the proposed text. If they fail, negotiations will have to be postponed until 2013, when Ireland takes over the EU's rotating presidency.

But regardless of the negotiation's final outcome, governments have already won a solid EU legal base for renovating public buildings, said Claude Turmes, the Green MEP from Luxembourg who is the chief Parliament negotiator on the draft efficiency bill.

Left-wing parties inched toward a parliamentary majority on Sunday, after exit polls placed the Socialist Party and its allies ahead of the conservative UMP party in the first round of Sunday's elections.

The UMP garnered an estimated 35.4 percent of the vote compared to the Socialist Party's 34.9 percent, in a ballot marked by low voter turnout. However, the Socialists' numbers combined with other left-wing parties secured the left an overall 47.1 percent of votes, according to estimates by the polling firm Ipsos.

The second round of the election, to be held on June 17, is expected to confirm the leftward trend in France, which saw François Hollande win the country's presidential elections on May 6.

The first estimates dispelled notions of an overwhelming victory, or so-called "pink surge", for Hollande's camp. The Socialist Party needs to win 289 seats of the 577-seat chamber to enjoy an absolute majority.

Next Sunday, left wing parties all together will get an estimated 310 to 355 seats (absolute majority is 289 seats).

PS might get an absolute majority of seats, but most likely will need support of EELV (Greens), PRG (Radicaux de Gauche) to reach the absolute majority mark.

In addition, Front de Gauche (Communists + PG) should get "14 to 20 seats" as estimated in Le Monde.

The Front National could win two seats:

First, Marine Le Pen in Hénin-Beaumont will face-off with PS candidate Philippe Kemel; Jean-Luc Mélenchon is eliminated from the race (and will probably support the PS).

Second, Gilbert Collard, a media savvy criminal defense attorney running under the FN label, arrived ahead with 35% in St Gilles (near Nîmes). The UMP candidate is considering "withdrawing in favor of Collard"; this would be the first time UMP is "officially" supporting a FN candidate.

As usual, between tonight and next Sunday (second round), there will be some interesting horse trading in the proverbial smoke filled backrooms. The big unknowns are the extent of the left wing majority and whether the FN might finally manage to get one of their own elected in the present system.

Marine Le Pen will be beaten. The curious decision of the UMP to not run a candidate against her is the only reason she scored so highly (42%), and everyone else will back the PS candidate.

Collard (FN) will win if the UMP withdraws, will lose to the PS if they stay in the race. Simple as that.

Marion Maréchal-Le Pen will lose because the PS candidate, who came third, will withdraw, and the PS electors will tip the second round to the UMP.

(When her grandpa Jean-Marie came to support her, he made a quip about how his daughter and grand-daughter were both good candidates because they were "de bonne race"... he was the best stand-up comic on the political circuit, and I miss him already.)

It is rightly acknowledged that people of faith have no monopoly of virtue
- Queen Elizabeth II

Curiously, I haven't found any decent analysis in the press this morning, so I've done my own.

Based on the first round and expected voting behaviour, I'm predicting a minimum of 11 seats for EELV (not counting Cécile Duflot, who will win her seat but hand it over to her PS replacement).

There are ten more seats which are in play, but would need either a national surge of support for the left in the second round, or (for example) most FN voters to stay at home rather than vote UMP, or particular local circumstances.

To my surprise, of the numerous challenges by defrocked PS candidates against EELV candidates officially supported by the PS, only one was knocked out (in Lyon).

So I'm sticking to my initial impression of a dozen seats, short of the target of 15.

It is rightly acknowledged that people of faith have no monopoly of virtue
- Queen Elizabeth II

(Reuters) - Euro zone finance ministers rushed Spain into an EU-funded rescue for its debt-stricken banks to pre-empt the threat of a bank run if Greece's debt crisis flares again but any respite for Madrid and the euro may be short-lived.

After weeks of insisting that Spain needed no assistance to recapitalize lenders crippled by bad debts from a burst real estate bubble, Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy was pushed into requesting an aid package for fear of worse disaster to come, European officials involved in the negotiations said.

The 17-nation currency area agreed to lend Madrid up to 100 billion euros ($125 billion) for its bank rescue fund, more than an initial audit suggests it is likely to need, in an attempt to reassure investors and erect a new firewall in the crisis.

But the euro zone's latest line in the sand, after bailouts for Greece, Ireland and Portugal since 2010, could be swept away as early as next Sunday by angry Greek voters, rekindling market turmoil that would hit Spain and Italy first.

Rajoy said his reforms had spared Spain a full rescue for its public debt but some analysts say the bank aid may only be a prelude to an eventual bailout of the state.

In fact, the whole story is starting to feel like a comedy routine: yet again the economy slides, unemployment soars, banks get into trouble, governments rush to the rescue -- but somehow it's only the banks that get rescued, not the unemployed.

So why am I not laughing?

The fact is that what we're experiencing right now is a top-down disaster. -Paul Krugman

Consider, for example, what Jörg Asmussen, the German representative on the European Central Bank's executive board, just said in Latvia, which has become the poster child for supposedly successful austerity. (It used to be Ireland, but the Irish economy keeps refusing to recover). "The key difference between, say, Latvia and Greece," Mr. Asmussen said, "lies in the degree of national ownership of the adjustment program -- not only by national policy-makers but also by the population itself."

Whatever the deep roots of this paralysis, it's becoming increasingly clear that it will take utter catastrophe to get any real policy action that goes beyond bank bailouts. But don't despair: at the rate things are going, especially in Europe, utter catastrophe may be just around the corner.

If you are not convinced, try it on someone who has not been entirely debauched by economics. — Piero Sraffa

Four years into the ever-darkening tunnel of recession, growing numbers of Spaniards are losing whatever faith they may have had in their political parties and the country's institutions. A new survey by pollsters Metroscopia shows that for 90 percent of people, the economic crisis is far and away their most pressing concern; the same percentage also believe that they have been abandoned by politicians of all stripes, accusing them of acting out of self-interest. In just seven months, since October 2011 to May, the number of people who believe that the current political system, with all its faults, is the best that the country has known has fallen from 72 percent to 56 percent.

....

"People don't understand how we got into this situation. They do not believe that they deserve what is happening to them, and they feel as though they have been abandoned by the government and the state whose job it is to protect them. I am picking up a growing anger and a demand for those responsible for this mess to be held to account," says Federico Javaloy, a professor of social psychology at Barcelona University.

José Tudela Aranda, a lecturer in administrative law and a legal advisor to the regional parliament of Aragon, believes that the financial crisis is partly the result of a dismantling of the role of the state. "We have seen how administrative controls have been removed or neutralized, weakening the role of public institutions. The role of secretaries, auditors, or accounts panels has been weakened because we have taken a laissez faire approach and appointed professionals because of the ideological views they hold. This explains the lack of budgetary control. Accounts panels or other means of controlling spending are essential and save money if they avoid the system from being abused, but they are very dangerous when they look the other way and allow malpractice. Corruption isn't just about stealing money, it is about twisting the law, about giving friends jobs," he says.

....

Recent opinion polls should be seen as a warning about the erosion of our democracy and the danger of sliding into situations we can no longer control. We are largely unaware of how easily our current economic crisis could spiral into a political crisis. Popular Party (PP) Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy likes to repeat that "Spain is a great country," but what he fails to understand is that there is a growing feeling among Spaniards that this country's democratic institutions are on their knees. A member of Rajoy's government says that the premier is focused exclusively on the crisis, and that it is impossible to discuss other matters of state or social policy.

One of the surprise bestsellers at the Madrid Book Fair, a major literary event currently underway in the capital has been a beautifully illustrated edition of the Communist Manifesto.

Published by a small outfit called Nórdica and illustrated by Fernando Vicente, the seminal work by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels appears to be thriving in the current crisis, as though readers not only wanted to understand what is going on in the world, but also to find out whether there are any alternatives out there.

The numerous inflammatory booklets of the "Time for Outrage" type seemed to have filled that void with their explanations of why governments addressed the crisis by unanimously implementing programs championed by conservative parties during boom times. But what Marx and Engels propose is a complete overhaul of the capitalist system, and it could well be that behind the unexpected success of the Communist Manifesto there lies a desire to see which parts of it might still be relevant and bring some hope to nations that have lost it almost completely.

(Reuters) - To every Portuguese, the town of Grandola is a cradle of the 1974 revolution that ended decades of dictatorship, but nowadays it is hard to find even a spark of revolt here against the worst economic hardship in the country's recent history.

A visit to Grandola inspired left-wing songwriter Zeca Afonso to write 'Grandola, Vila Morena', the song that was played on the radio to signal the start of the revolt.

White-walled and now sleepy, the town nestles in the southern cork-growing region. A few shuttered shops are the only visible signs of the debt crisis that brought the country to its knees.

Grandola illustrates Portugal's surprisingly low-key opposition to austerity, unlike Greece and Spain, as it grapples with the harshest recession since the 1970s under the terms of an international 78-billion-euro ($97-billion) bailout.

Idiotic accounts about the 1974 revolution, which was strictly a military operation, not a revolt. The song "Grandola vila morena" was one of the coded signals issue that night; the city itself had nothing to do with the operation.

50 years of Fascism were themselves a good account of how my folk deal with this sort of hardship: some ran way, other bought in and tried to make the best of it.

The liberal party is the largest party in Portugal, having had profound influence both on Conservatives and Socialists. This admiration for the neo-liberal ideology meant that between 2000 and 2010 half of the population was below the poverty line at some point. Hence the sort of hardship lived today is no stranger for most.

Eurozone finance ministers agree a 100bn rescue programme for Spain; no decision yet on whether this loan will come from the ESM or the EFSF; Mariano Rajoy declared victory for Spain, while Alfredo Rubalcaba said the government behaves as though they won the lottery; El Pais says the claim that no fiscal conditions are attached to the deal is false: if Spain deviates from the agreed stability pact programme, the money will stop; conditions will include caps on bank salaries and dividends, staff cuts, branch closures and mergers; in the discussion, Finland and the Netherlands demanded tougher conditions; Finland said it would require collateral if the loan was made by the EFSF; the IMF's Financial Stability Assessment of Spain says the country's was facing a banking crisis of unprecedented proportions; stress tests reveal a capital shortage of 40bn, but this figure was likely to rise; report says the main threat to the Spanish banks now is no[t] real estate but the deteriorating economy; commentators have been focusing on the continued interdependence of the Spanish banks and the Spanish state; FT Alphaville is asking the question what happens to Spain's EFSF commitment if it receives a loan from the EFSF; Heike Göbel says the EU has given up on the principle of conditionality, as a result others will ask for similar concession; Hugo Müller-Vogg laments that Spain will ultimately need a lot more than 100bn, leaving the German taxpayer exposed; Nicolas Barre writes that Spain has been in denial for too long; Jens Weidmann welcomes the deal and urges Spain to carry out more reforms; French Socialists are on course for an absolute majority at the run-off; in the first round, the tie with UMP; Mario Draghi, Hermann van Rompuy, Jose Manual Barroso and Jean-Claude Juncker are preparing a plan for a large fiscal union, with joint and several liability for newly issued debt; the SPD threatens to block the fiscal pact, suspecting that the government is cheating on its commitment to introduce a stock exchange turnover tax; Wolfgang Munchau says EU leaders need to sequence the roadmap to a political union carefully, starting with concrete proposals for a banking union; Niall Ferguson and Nouriel Roubini, meanwhile, say that Germany has failed to learn[] the lessons from the economic depression.

If you are not convinced, try it on someone who has not been entirely debauched by economics. — Piero Sraffa

European Commission sources on Sunday described Rajoy's presentation of what is likely to be a 100-billion-euro bailout to clean up Spain's banks as a "domestic political" maneuver, and insisted that the loan will be "strictly linked to fulfilling the European Stability and Growth Pact, no matter what the government says."

...

But as the spokesman for the European commissioner for economic and monetary affairs, Amadeu Altafaj, on Monday pointed out, the increase in Spain's indebtedness will have implications for its commitments to reining its public deficit and bringing it back within the ceiling of three percent of GDP by 2014. "Every euro that goes to debt that is growing is a euro that does not go to productive spending," the spokesman said.

...

In more graphic terms, the EU commissioner for competition, Spaniard Joaquín Almunia, said "of course there will be conditions" imposed in exchange for the loan. "Whoever gives money doesn't do so for free," he added.

If you are not convinced, try it on someone who has not been entirely debauched by economics. — Piero Sraffa

The French Pirate Party, which promotes freedom of internet download, failed to emulate its cousins ​​in Sweden and Germany by making a breakthrough in the first round of Sunday legislation, often with modest scores for its 101 candidates.

Only a quarter of them (25) crossed the symbolic threshold of 1% of the votes cast. The best scores were achieved in the first district of Haut-Rhin (2.41%) and second in the North (2.05%) but without equaling the result (2.85%) of the candidate in the seventh constituency of French nationals abroad (Germany).

Currently operates primarily in Ile-de-France, Alsace, Midi-Pyrenees and in the Lyon region, the Pirate Party will not be able to get public funding, reserved for political parties that achieve at least one % of votes in 50 constituencies in parliamentary elections.

It is rightly acknowledged that people of faith have no monopoly of virtue
- Queen Elizabeth II

NEW YORK - It is now clear that the main cause of the euro crisis is the member states' surrender of their right to print money to the European Central Bank. They did not understand just what that surrender entailed - and neither did the European authorities.

When the euro was introduced, regulators allowed banks to buy unlimited amounts of government bonds without setting aside any equity capital, and the ECB discounted all eurozone government bonds on equal terms. Commercial banks found it advantageous to accumulate weaker countries' bonds to earn a few extra basis points, which caused interest rates to converge across the eurozone. Germany, struggling with the burdens of reunification, undertook structural reforms and became more competitive. Other countries enjoyed housing and consumption booms on the back of cheap credit, making them less competitive.

(Reuters) - U.S. stocks will get a lift on Monday after euro zone finance ministers agreed to lend Spain up to 100 billion euros ($125 billion) to help its battered banks.

The surprisingly large amount of aid removes a huge cloud that has been hanging over financial markets, with investors fearing that a banking crisis in euro zone's fourth-largest economy could have compounded the currency bloc's troubles with Greece.

Though the exact amount to be lent will be decided in just over a week, striking a deal now means Spain has added support in case Greece's June 17 elections throw financial markets into a tailspin.

"This is a major step in avoiding a contagion," said Tim Speiss, partner-in-charge of EisnerAmper's Personal Wealth Advisors Group in New York.

(Reuters) - Britain's banking regulator could be handed new powers to enforce government recommendations on how the country's largest banks should ring fence their retail and investment operations, The Sunday Telegraph reported.

UK finance minister George Osborne will signal a more accommodating tone on regulation at an annual dinner for bankers this Thursday, hosted by The City of London, where he is due to outline how the government will implement the Vickers report.

Osborne is expected to say that prescriptive regulation is not the best way to improve the safety of Britain's banks as he hands powers to the new Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA), which will be run by the Bank of England, to decide how much extra capital the retail arms of banks should hold to safeguard the sector, the paper says.

China's exports grew in May at more than double the pace analysts estimated while industrial output and retail sales trailed forecasts, signaling last week's cut in interest rates was aimed at countering a domestic slowdown.

Overseas shipments climbed 15.3 percent from a year earlier, the customs bureau said yesterday, exceeding all 29 estimates in a Bloomberg News survey. Industrial output rose by less than 10 percent for a second month and retail sales increased the least in almost six years excluding holiday-month distortions, statistics bureau reports showed June 9.

China's resilience in trade indicates Europe's debt crisis has yet to produce a collapse in world commerce on the scale of the 2008 global recession, even as the plight of Spain's banks threatens to deepen the trauma. Stronger exports and imports also support the case for Premier Wen Jiabao to adopt a more restrained stimulus than the credit boom that started in late 2008 and stoked a property bubble.

"The better-than-expected trade data should help alleviate ongoing concerns of a sharp growth deterioration in the near term," said Sun Junwei, a Beijing-based economist with HSBC Holdings Plc. "The key to securing a soft landing pivots on reviving domestic demand and that will necessitate more stimulus but it will be more measured than in 2008 and monetary policy won't be eased excessively."

Australia's economic performance is proving the "doomsayers" wrong, Treasurer Wayne Swan said ahead of a government conference this week to address challenges including an elevated currency and uneven growth.

A 4.3 percent expansion in the first quarter from a year earlier and the addition of 38,900 jobs in May were standout achievements, Swan said in his weekly economic note yesterday. Capitalizing on growth opportunities is a topic at Prime Minister Julia Gillard's economic forum in Brisbane on June 12-13, he said.

Public support for Gillard's government isn't getting a lift from one of the fastest-growing economies in the developed world, led by the resource-rich regions in the north and west. Consumer confidence is subdued and her governing Labor Party trails in opinion polls as tourism, manufacturing and retail industries across the south and east struggle with the sustained strength of the local currency.

President Thein Sein has declared a state of emergency in western Myanmar following deadly clashes between local Buddhists and Muslim Bengalis.

State television on Sunday said a dusk to dawn curfew has been imposed in the Rakhine state capital of Sittwe and three other townships. Public gathering of more than five persons were also banned.

The move follows rioting on Friday in two other areas of Rakhine state that, according to state media, left at least seven people dead and 17 wounded, and saw hundreds of houses burned down.

Official accounts blamed the rioting in Maungdaw and Buthidaung townships on 1,000 "terrorists", but residents' accounts made clear they were Muslims, apparently retaliating for the June 3 lynching of 10 Muslims by a crowd of 300 Buddhists.

The mob had been inflamed by the rape and murder last month of a Buddhist girl, allegedly by three Muslim men.

Thirteen people have been killed in a second day of clashes between Libyan soldiers and tribesmen in the remote southeast, a government security official said.

Violence erupted in the early hours of Saturday in the city of Al Kufra, near Libya's borders with Chad and Sudan, where armed forces were sent in February to quell fighting in a long-standing rivalry between the Tibu and Zwai tribes.

Bouts of violence in the southern Sahara and in the mountainous west have shown how volatile Libya remains following last year's demise of Muammar Gaddafi, who had long played off one tribe or clan against the other to weaken their power.

A Kufra official said on Saturday that the Tibu had launched an attack on the city, around 1,100km southeast of the capital Tripoli. A Tibu representative said it was the tribe that had come under attack.

"The Tibu tried to attack the city at 4am (02:00GMT) this morning with tanks and weapons. Three soldiers and six citizens were killed. There are many injured," Abdelbari Idriss, a security official in the city, said by phone. "The clashes have continued since this morning."

Kenya's minister for internal security, who once served as the country's vice president, and his deputy are among six people who died when a police helicopter crashed near the capital Nairobi, according to Kenyan officials.

Minister George Saitoti and his deputy, Orwa Ojode, were killed in the crash, Vice President Kalonzo Musyoka said on Sunday.

Two pilots and two bodyguards were also killed, officials said.

Saitoti, 66, was a candidate in next year's presidential election and a key figure driving his country's fight against al-Qaeda-affiliated al-Shabab fighters in neighbouring Somalia.

The crash occurred in the Ngong hills on the outskirts of the Kenyan capital, a police source told AFP, adding that the reason for the crash was not immediately clear.

Kenyan Prime Minister Raila Odinga said investigations into the cause of the crash had started and that the cabinet would hold a special session on the incident.

UNITED NATIONS, Jun 9, 2012 (IPS) - With the international community vowing to ratchet up pressure on the Syrian government, non-violent activists say they remain undeterred even as the situation seems to be deteriorate daily.

The peaceful demonstrations that marked the beginning of the Syrian uprising in February 2011 have faded into a distant past, and calls for a diplomatic resolution to the conflict now contend with a context of escalating abuses.

Following the May 25 attack on Houla, in which 108 people were killed, including 49 children, many under the age of 10, and recent reports of large-scale killings in Mazraat al-Qubeir and Kafr Zeta, the pressure has also mounted on U.N.-Arab League joint special envoy Kofi Annan.

National Review Online, ...according to a new report in Germany's leading daily, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), the Houla massacre was in fact committed by anti-Assad Sunni militants, and the bulk of the victims were member of the Alawi and Shia minorities, which have been largely supportive of Assad. For its account of the massacre, the report cites opponents of Assad, who, however, declined to have their names appear in print out of fear of reprisals from armed opposition groups.

Angry Arab comments: I still can't verify this account but I will say this: I have not seen (and believe I have asked) any credible evidence that some victims were from families that had converted to Shi`ism. 2) the family of the Syrian MP were not killed but relatives were.

"Beware of the man who does not talk, and the dog that does not bark." Cheyenne

When Mitt Romney was serving as bishop of his church in 1981, one of his two counselors wrote home to his mother with a prediction: This guy could wind up in the White House.

In the then-34-year-old Romney -- who would put in long hours at his consulting job at Bain & Company only to spend early mornings, late nights and weekends visiting ward members in need and administering church business -- Philip Barlow said he saw the marks of an unusually effective leader, and someone who "epitomized Mormon culture."

"I found his executive ability so extraordinary that I remember writing home to my mother that this guy could be president of the United States," said Barlow, now a professor of Mormon history and culture at Utah State University in Logan. "He's got a strong dose of Mormon can-do optimism -- an optimistic confidence and resilience about overcoming challenges. I almost got a sense that he was ready to jump out of his chair and leap to action."

Loss of production may be one concern cotton producers have on the Rolling Plains when considering switching to reduced- or no-tillage systems, said Dr. Paul DeLaune, Texas AgriLife Research environmental soil scientist in Vernon.

Not only will cotton growers not lose production with subsurface drip irrigation, their economics will improve, according to DeLaune's latest research article that will appear in the July-August issue of Agronomy Journal.

DeLaune's study on cotton production as affected by irrigation level and transitioning tillage systems was designed to identify water management strategies that conserve and protect water resources within semiarid environments.

"We found that tillage has no impact on yields, the net returns are greater and, because we can deficit irrigate, we can save energy and water," he said.

Zero tillage uses less energy and is more favourable to the reconstitution of a living, fertile soil than deep ploughing. Subsurface drip irrigation uses less energy and water than current air-spray systems. Irrespective of the question of chemical use in agriculture, these techniques are an important way forward to more sustainable farming.

Back in 2006, a team of scientists from Canada, the United States, Sweden, and Panama published a landmark report in the prestigious journal Science on the state of the oceans. The researchers highlighted what they called an "ongoing erosion of diversity" in sea life that, if left unchecked, would lead to the "collapse of all taxa currently being fished by the mid-21st century."

Stripped of scientese, what the report described was the real possibility of the ocean as a vast, fetid gray zone, not quite dead but no longer able to provide a significant amount of food to humanity. And not in some unimaginably distant future, but rather in just four short decades, around the time when your aughts-era infant will reach middle age.

Weeds in sugar beet fields have developed resistance to the chemicals farmers have been using for years, but they're not resistant to glyphosate, which hasn't been used very often in conventional sugar beet cultivation. As a result, these Roundup Ready seeds allowed farmers to use a chemical -- glyphosate -- that their weeds hadn't really been exposed to and thus represented a bit of a game-changer for sugar beet farmers who had been left out of Big Ag's glyphosate party.

Despite its instant success, Monsanto's product hit a few speed bumps in 2010. That year, a federal judge revoked the U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA) approval for the seed in response to a lawsuit filed by the Center for Food Safety on the basis that the agency violated the law by failing to perform a full environmental impact statement for the seed. This is a critical oversight given the risks of genetic contamination of conventional and organic seeds by the GMO seeds through wind-blown pollen, as well as the current superweed crisis caused by overuse of glyphosate.

The problem with the judge's order, however, was that Monsanto had so successfully crowded out sugar beet seed competitors that once he ruled the beets "illegal" it quickly became clear that there were no conventional sugar beet seeds to be found. So America faced the prospect of total Armageddon the zombie apocalypse cats and dogs sleeping together a 20 percent reduction in that year's sugar crop. In response -- and in defiance of the federal judge's order -- the USDA allowed farmers to plant GM sugar beets anyway.

But this may be the last place Monsanto can peddle their glycophosphate glop and the seeds to go with. But it will likely cease to work there in three to five years, as so many weeds now are resistant.

None of the 1% will be eating Soylent Green. Just as in china where the rich have their own farms growing organic food, the US will see certain farms being reserved for rich people shops.

In UK you see that already with shops like Harrods, Daylesford or Borough Market gradually pricing themselves out of reach for normal people. Decent food for the rich, Tesco corporate waste (aka NuFood) for the rest of us

Official figures show Europe expects to decommission almost 150 of its nuclear power plants by 2030, while the US has granted life extensions to 71 and chosen to close only five, according to a report by energy experts GlobalData.

The new report shows that the figure for Europe accounts for nearly 69% of the total global number of expected nuclear power reactor closures by 2030, the largest amount for any region. Barring any changes, the European commercial nuclear decommissioning market value stands at $81,484m.

As of January 2012, France, the UK and Russia have the highest decommissioning market values in Europe, with market values of $21,494m, $18,717m, and $13,446m, respectively.

The best of them - and that would be Marc Morano, proprietor of the website Climate Depot, and Anthony Watts, of the website Watts Up With That - have fought with remarkable tenacity to stall and delay the inevitable recognition that we're in serious trouble. They've never had much to work with. Only one even remotely serious scientist remains in the denialist camp. That's MIT's Richard Lindzen, who has been arguing for years that while global warming is real it won't be as severe as almost all his colleagues believe. But as a long article in the New York Times detailed last month, the credibility of that sole dissenter is basically shot. Even the peer reviewers he approved for his last paper told the National Academy of Sciences that it didn't merit publication. (It ended up in a "little-known Korean journal".)

Deprived of actual publishing scientists to work with, they've relied on a small troupe of vaudeville performers, featuring them endlessly on their websites. Lord Christopher Monckton, for instance, an English peer (who has been officially warned by the House of Lords to stop saying he's a member) began his speech at Heartland's annual conference by boasting that he had "no scientific qualification" to challenge the science of climate change.

He's proved the truth of that claim many times, beginning in his pre-climate-change career when he explained to readers of the American Spectator that "there is only one way to stop AIDS. That is to screen the entire population regularly and to quarantine all carriers of the disease for life". His personal contribution to the genre of climate-change mass-murderer analogies has been to explain that a group of young climate-change activists who tried to take over a stage where he was speaking were "Hitler Youth".

Virginia's legislature commissioned a $50,000 study to determine the impacts of climate change on the state's shores. To greenlight the project, they omitted words like "climate change" and "sea level rise" from the study's description itself. According to the House of Delegates sponsor of the study, these are "liberal code words," even though they are noncontroversial in the climate science community.

Instead of using climate change, sea level rise, and global warming, the study uses terms like "coastal resiliency" and "recurrent flooding." Republican State Delegate Chris Stolle, who steered the legislation, cut "sea level rise" from the draft. Stolle has also said the "jury's still out" on humans' impact on global warming:

Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out.

The current theory of continental drift provides a good model for understanding terrestrial processes through history. However, while plate tectonics is able to successfully shed light on processes up to 3 billion years ago, the theory isn't sufficient in explaining the dynamics of the earth and crust formation before that point and through to the earliest formation of planet, some 4.6 billion years ago.

This is the conclusion of Tomas Naaeraa of the Nordic Center for Earth Evolution at the Natural History Museum of Denmark, a part of the University of Copenhagen. His new doctoral dissertation has just been published by the esteemed international scientific journal, Nature.

"Using radiometric dating, one can observe that the Earth's oldest continents were created in geodynamic environments which were markedly different than current environments characterised by plate tectonics.

Therefore, plate tectonics as we know it today is not a good model for understanding the processes at play during the earliest episodes of the Earths's history, those beyond 3 billion years ago.

There was another crust dynamic and crust formation that occurred under other processes," explains Tomas Naeraa, who has been a PhD student at the Natural History Museum of Denmark and the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland - GEUS.

Researchers aboard the US Coast Guard icebreaker ship, Healy, sampled beneath the 0.8-1.3 meter (2.4-4.0 feet) thick sea ice and found phytoplankton biomass was "extremely high, about fourfold greater than in open water."

The "massive under-ice bloom" also appeared to extend about 100 kilometers (60 miles) into the ice shelf, until "the waters literally looked like pea soup," mission leader Kevin Arrigo told reporters.

"We were astonished. It was completely unexpected. It was literally the most intense phytoplankton bloom I have ever seen in my 25 years of doing this type of research," said Arrigo, a scientist at Stanford University in California.

(...) Arrigo said the discovery caused "a fundamental shift in our understanding of the Arctic ecosystem," which was previously believed to be cold and desolate.

Before, the tiny single-celled plants were not believed to grow until the ice melted.

"If you rank all the phytoplankton blooms anywhere in the world by the amount of phytoplankton that is contained in them, the under-ice bloom that we saw during ICESCAPE would finish at the very top of the list," he added.

Hundreds of protesters have clashed with police in the streets of the Chilean capital to protest a ceremony centred around a new documentary honouring the late Augusto Pinochet.

"Murderer, Murderer!" chanted the demonstrators at Teatro Caupolican on Sunday, ahead of the screening of Pinochet, which celebrates the general's 1973-1990 military dictatorship.

Police responded by firing tear gas and water cannons at demonstrators to prevent their advance toward the theater, which was hosting more than 1,000 Pinochet supporters for the tribute.

"The police are limiting our activity in order to allow activities in honour of the dictator. This is paying tribute to a criminal," Mireya Garcia, vice-president of the Association of Relatives of Detained and Disappeared (AFDD), told CNN Chile.

ISTANBUL, May 31, 2012 (IPS) - Lawmakers from 110 countries, representing all continents, pledged here last week to intensify efforts, individually and collectively, aiming to attain the goals on safeguarding people's rights to sexual health and freedom to determine their reproductive choices. The goals were set at the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD), held in 1994 in Cairo.

The 2012 International Parliamentarians Conference on Implementation of ICPD (ICPI) was the fifth of the kind since its creation in 2002, and gathered 220 members of national parliaments and as many experts and academics. Organised by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) and the European Parliamentary Forum on Population and Development (EPF), ICPI was hosted by the Turkish Grand Assembly and government.

At the end of the conference, the MPs issued a 3,000-word declaration, under the title `Keeping Promises- Measuring Results', to confirm their commitment to achieving ICPD's objectives, which include: HIV and AIDS prevention; decreasing by 75 percent mothers' mortality at giving birth; having states allocate 10 percent of their respective national development budgets and third-country assistance funds to population and reproductive health programmes; and ensuring that countries dedicate 0.7 percent of their Gross National Product (GNP) to securing sexual and reproductive rights of their citizens.

The Daily Beast's Zachary Karabell sits down with reknowned economist to talk about a less-discussed form of inequality: how our country's best young minds end up innovating on Wall Street instead of in laboratories or at universities.

If you are not convinced, try it on someone who has not been entirely debauched by economics. — Piero Sraffa

Mr Q (a fictitious name) has lost his job. His son has always been unemployed. He's received a payment demand from Equitalia for the sum of 10,000 euro and an accountant is looking into it and hasn't yet asked for payment for his services. His wife needs costly medicines that have to be paid for. He can't keep up the mortgage payments and he'll have to move out of his apartment. The utility bills for water, gas, rubbish collection and electricity are heavy blows that he no longer tries to avoid. They arrive in his face every month and he pays them when he can together with the excess for late payment. His daughter was close to being raped and they've had a burglary in the house. He's paying for the reinforced door in instalments. At weekends he's always escaping from pollution. However, the increase in the petrol price only allows him to travel 50 km (there and back) to get out of the city. He has to turn back when the fuel indicator turns fiery red. Grandpa died recently, and so did his pension that made a contribution to the weekly shopping at Lidl, thus leaving the family in a desperate state. Mr Q has always been viscerally anti-political. "Politics is dirty (this is why he washes his hands of the matter)." "Politics is what's done by politicians." "I've got other things to do rather than spend my time on politics." "There are those who work and those who do politics and I work." Mr Q (how many millions of Mr Qs are there in Italy that always have sweet dreams at night ?) detests politics. But if he doesn't spend his time doing politics, it's politics that deals with him. It skins him alive. It takes his civil rights away from him. It takes away the freedom of information, the right to health care, to a home, to work, to have safety and to have a future for his son. Mr Q's anti-political stance has its deep roots in the gap between the citizen and the State, between an ideal and non-existent world in which one's own interests are cultivated, and the world "out there" that will never knock on your door.

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty

Today's scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander off through equation after equation, and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality - Nikola Tesla

"The scientists from Franklin to Morse were clear thinkers and did not produce erroneous theories. The scientists of today think deeply instead of clearly. One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane." -- Nikola Tesla.

whoa...

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty